It starts with a girl walking home, cutting across a frozen river, and seeing something she shouldn’t. 

The Break moves outward in shards, much like the cracking ice that so frequently appears in the novel. Each chapter passes the aftermath to someone else: the girl, her mother, the police, the men responsible, the extended web of family and community that has to absorb what’s been done. No single voice owns the narrative, but no one gets clean distance from it either.

Set in Winnipeg, Vermette writes into the lived reality of Métis women that makes this a very radical book. Violence isn’t framed as an isolated event but as something structural, inherited, ambient. It's the why, what, how of things that keep happening—through systems, through memory, through people trying, imperfectly, to hold each other together.

It’s heavy, but not blunt. There’s care in it, even when it’s cutting. 

House of Anansi paperback (2016). Very good condition. Clean pages, light shelf wear to edges.